


white knuckled and dreaming

by creamandkahlua



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Hallucinations, Multi, explicit sexual fantasies fueled by sweet sweet guilt, felix is traumatized and i personally find it very sexy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-23 02:21:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23337511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creamandkahlua/pseuds/creamandkahlua
Summary: Felix can't let go, but it's not his fault. Is it?
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Bernadetta von Varley, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Lysithea von Ordelia
Comments: 2
Kudos: 42





	white knuckled and dreaming

Felix trains and trains because sleep is as elusive as a slippery eel and there are things he has to make sure never come to light. Even now, with Fodlan drowsing in easy peace and Dimitri’s reign coming on five years, Felix never lets up. He never lets go.

He pours blood and sweat into every hour spent on his private training grounds, parrying imaginary blows and swinging his sword in maneuvers he knows better than his own breathing. He stops for nothing and no one, but even when exhaustion dims his vision and clings heavily to his body, the images are as clear as ever.

Silver hair and cherry-blossom eyes, defiant to the last. He can remember her delicate hand cradling the curve of her cheek and the way she’d tilt her head, her mind as lethal as any blade.

Lysithea von Ordelia. The youngest of them all. Taken by his sword when they’d met the Leicester Alliance. When he loses to Lysithea, he loses to them all.

Lysithea’s image fades, giving way to hands like butterfly wings.

Bernadetta von Varley. Fragile and tempestuous. Maddening. Taken by his magic when the Adrestian Empire had run wild.

Fingers always fluttering by her side with nerves unless they were on a bow or reins, unless they were making a song from needle and thread. Oh and those eyes, remarkable for their lustre and that mix of hopeless and warm. He can remember the pulse in the slender column of her throat and her violet hair, tangled in the wind.

Felix grits his teeth and puts away his sword. His thighs are shaking and his fingers numb. The room around him seems elastic and absurd, and he wants to laugh in the face of it all. He swallows instead, struggling to breathe. Behind Lysithea and Bernadetta, as striking as a sunrise, is Annette Dominic.

Taken by his negligence when the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus was a moment away from victory, because he wasn’t fast enough. When it counts, he’s never fast enough.

The three of them, Lysithea, Bernadetta and Annette, have nothing in common. Not really. Nothing but their blood on Felix’s hands and his awful, ravenous desire. The sword clatters out of his hand as he falls to his knees. Unforgivable, he thinks. You never drop a blade.

 _Never mind a blade,_ cake _is the thing you make sure never to drop._ Lysithea corrects him in that imperious tone of hers, with her eyes narrowed and a hand on her hip. The jut of her chin is just as he remembers, her posture as straight as an arrow. _And you know why, right? The three-second rule is a lie._

She says it with such challenge and god. His fingers feel like they’re crackling with lightning, the world taking on that startling clarity he only ever finds in battle.

It isn’t that he wants these apparitions to disappear or that he wants her to go quiet. The truth is, Felix loves the force in her voice—the way it’s sharp and unforgiving, like she expects every word to be met with a fight. In that aspect, she’s so like him it stings.

In any case, he wants to fight her for the silence. He wants to be bound by her magic as she sits on his face, her thin fingers brushing aside his hair the way she turns a page, commanding him to do as she says. He wants her silver hair in his fist, her small mouth on his cock as he empties down her throat. He’s so hard it aches.

He wants to hear her choke and fight it, wants to feel her tongue flicking at the head of his cock as she swallows down with her nails digging into his thighs. He wants her to toss her hair and ask him, her voice rough from having her throat fucked, if that was meant to be a challenge. Felix bites his lip, trying to focus on the cold stone floor and the dirt.

Lysithea bends in front of him, tilting his face up to hers. _You made me bleed out, Felix._

The cracks in the floor soak with blood and the dirt darkens with it. The stone beneath him feels wet and hot, and the air smells like old metal and crushed petals. Felix shudders, sick with longing throbbing between his legs. Lysithea leans in close with her lips parted and Felix tries to dig his fingers into the stone because all he can think of is kissing her, is bearing her to the ground and sinking into her.

_You’re the last person I ever saw. Did you know that? You stabbed me, right here, and I could have killed you._

Felix swallows, jerking his head away. He knows that. He’d gotten too close. He doesn’t even have an excuse. Lysithea has always been magnetic in a way magic couldn’t explain, like a goddess or a curse, something fated for something greater than the lot of them. Even with a sword through her, Lysithea could have summoned a moon to swallow him whole. She could have opened the ground and sent him spiraling to hell or left him in the air to die, suspended by great black spikes of magic.

Nobody had ever doubted that Lysithea was a terrifying opponent. Their war council had stalled trying to account for her strategy and then for her strength, and in the end, Felix had driven a dagger through the table and left, snapping like a rabid dog that he would make the ultimate sacrifice. She couldn’t be entrusted to anyone else.

He would have slit the throat of anyone who so much as whispered about divine providence. Like his affinity for reason, his strange insight and innate resistance, his raw ability to bend it to his will, had been made for this: had been made to nullify the threat of Lysithea von Ordelia. The thought had wrestled violently with every cell of his body. He could still remember her shining eyes and her rare laugh, her quickness as she’d shoved a dessert into his mouth and danced away.

He can remember it now, as clearly as the moment he’d killed her.

Lysithea’s fingers go gentle, tracing his jaw. He looks back at her and wonders if he was always so easy to read. _Do you know why I didn’t?_

Felix closes his eyes. Her fingers are so cold. Even when she’d been alive, her fingers had always been bloodless, and freezing. They move down his throat and his pulse hammers. It beats harder than it ever did in the face of any threat. His mouth is so dry. _Felix._

He doesn’t want to do it, but when has that ever stopped him? He opens his eyes and Lysithea rests her hand between his collarbones. _You looked just like this. Desperate._

Her hand flits back up to his jaw. She brushes her thumb between his lips, and he can’t help it. His mouth parts, his breath coming in pants. _You looked like you wanted to fuck me._

Felix grabs her wrist and she vanishes. All he’s left with is the memory of her face turned up to his, holding onto his shoulders with trembling hands. She’d breathed out so shakily as she died, her lashes glittering with tears. _Oh_ , she’d said. _Oh._

She would have looked so much like that if he’d kissed her instead. If he’d made her come.

Felix staggers to his feet, wanting to throw himself off a turret. He leaves the sword on the ground, clutching at his chest like he’s holding his heart in. The warm candlelight flickers and the corridors seem to move. He thinks that a maze would be nothing to Lysithea and he punches the wall, crumpling against it and cradling his hand.

He hears a soft yelp and a rustle, the sort of sound the heavy drapes make when the wind stirs them with forlorn fingers, or someone slender slips behind them. The sound is so familiar that he wants to throw up. Bernadetta, hiding. Bernadetta, hiding, when she could so easily put him on the floor. He straightens, moving desperately now with his hand braced against the wall.

He’s so close to his room. He could find the sleep draughts with his eyes closed and he often does. He’s so close.

There’s a sigh of relief against the back of his neck and Felix’s heart drops. He rounds on the intruder with a dagger in his hand, forcing them against the wall. Their head hits the stone wall without a sound and whoever they are, they go pliant in his grip.

The tip of the blade touches Bernadetta’s throat and a drop of pomegranate red swells at its point. She hiccups, her lips pressed so tightly together they’re bloodless. Her violet eyes shine with tears. _How do you always find me?_

Felix presses his forehead against the wall and their long hair mixes together, like shades of a river in twilight. He brings his palms to either side of her, pinning her against the wall with his body, letting the dagger drop by his feet. She’s breathing the way she does when she’s afraid. He can feel her gasps against his chest.

The Adrestian Empire’s only sniper. Unmatched with a bow and arrow, with a perfectly complementary crest. Felix knows what that’s like. After all, his crest makes the swing of his sword sharper, weights it with ungodly might, matches his swordsmanship so beautifully that he’s unstoppable. They’d hidden her away. It had been a masterful plan. A Bernadetta who was unreachable, who was unkillable, would be able to disappear into the stitching of her arrows with deadly grace and speed, sewing together a victory.

Felix swallows. He wants to tell her that he’s sorry.

The first few times, he’d tried to find her to return something. A satchel, maybe? Even after that fiasco had come to a close, he’d always manage to find her, purely by accident. She’d freeze up or she’d scream, then run so fast he’d lose her in the blink of an eye. If he’d been less of a contrary piece of shit, maybe he would have taken pains not to open strange and secret doors, not to fling wide the drapes, not to find more hidden compartments for his expanding inventory of swords and whetstones and the like.

Just as soon as he’d grit his teeth and decided to end this once and for all, she’d stopped hiding. Well. She’d hide just to see if he would find her and then she would smile up at him, breathless with surprise and so, so beautiful when she did.

Bernadetta leans her head against his chest, her hair arranged neatly alongside the nape of her neck. Felix unravels the ties, his callused fingers shaking as he brushes it out, unclipping the strands that used to fall into her face. He blames this, more than anything else. He’d been so used to her frightened eyes and her tense frame, her arms up as if to ward off a blow.

The first time he’d found her, she looked up at him with her lips drawn into a pout and her eyes flashing. _No fair! This was my best hiding spot._ He’d never seen another emotion on her face, and it shone. His eyes had bugged out of his head and in his stunned silence, her indignation had faded, her eyes glowing softly. _S-sorry. I hide a lot, and you always seem to find me, and you must think I’m silly and a nuisance, but—_

Felix remembers his reply with crushing embarrassment. _You don’t have to hide. You put me on the ground._ He remembers thinking that if he’d seen her feeling something other than anxious, even _once_ , maybe it wouldn’t have hit him quite so hard. Her expressive mouth and her warm cheeks, her lilac eyes seeming to shimmer in her disbelief. Felix had told himself it was simply another way to train but it had been a lie.

It had been a game, one of the few in his miserable life, and Bernadetta slamming him into the ground, taking him out at the knees with her surprised, delighted peals of laughter, was the kind of goal that had mattered inexplicably.

Felix circles her thin wrists in his hand and draws them up by her jaw, leaning down with his mouth by her ear. Her fear is such a physical thing, juddering under her skin. Her nerves are burning alive with terror, her eyes darting from him to the door. Even her pulse seems to be screaming. He sounds so much more in control than he is when he tells her not to scream. He hates the sound of his voice, low and wretched, like an animal.

Bernadetta bites down on a thin sob and desire cuts through Felix like a knife. The fight drains out of her, with only the wall and Felix’s grip to hold her up. A tear slips down her cheek. _I should have known I couldn’t hide from you._

It rises up like a tidal wave. He wants to hush Bernadetta as he slips his fingers into her. He wants to kiss away her tears as she comes around his knuckles and he wants to gather her up into his arms as he teases his cock between her lips and shatters her cage of terror. He wants her to let go and live in that moment of power when she flips him on his back, when she breaks his grip and leaves him dazed, he wants her to ride him and rake his chest with her nails. She’s so small and warm in his arms. She looks up at him, with a smile that wavers on her lips. _I was still alive when you undid my hair, back then. All you had to do was ask, Felix._

In an instant, she’s gone. Felix curses with his head against the wall, numb to everything but the silver feeling in his hand, the ghost of a lock of hair slipping out of his grip. In every fantasy and wicked dream he’s ever had of her, Bernadetta’s hair is wild and unruly, like waves tossed by the sea. She would hide behind it, shy as ever, until he did well enough to make her come, and then she would place her hands over his, guiding them to her small tits and slender throat, arching her hips so he could sink in deeper, winning over and over and over again, just when he thought he’d had her cornered.

Felix bites his lip, hard enough to draw blood. All these years, he’d been so sure that whatever kind of fucked up he was, it wasn’t the kind of fucked up that could ruin everything. Not the kind of fucked up that Sylvain and Ingrid and Dimitri had been, which would have swallowed them alive. Now, he wants to slash the universe in half.

Annette is waiting in his doorway and Felix clenches his jaw, trying and failing to suppress the strike of longing in his stomach when she smiles at him. _It’s okay, Felix. We’ll take care of you_.

“Shut up. Get out of my head.” It sounds weak, even to him, and he hates it. 

Bernadetta peeks out from behind her shoulder and Lysithea walks through, standing shoulder to shoulder with Annette. She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. Annette frowns at her and takes a step forward, reaching for Felix’s hand. _What’s wrong?_

What’s wrong? What’s wrong is that it isn’t Dimitri or Ingrid or Sylvain that’s insatiable and hopeless and savage, it’s him, it’s _Felix._

What’s wrong is that out of the thousands that he’s killed, it’s these three, frozen in their academy days, that haunt his every moment. What’s wrong is that it isn’t guilt that makes them dangerous. What’s wrong is that he’s sick and cruel, and he’s never, not once, been in control.

He can’t let go. He doesn’t want to. His hallucinations are as potent as a spell, so rich with detail that they seem real and so constant that it’s eating him alive. He wants them so much, alive and difficult and—

 _wet._ He wants Lysithea to whine on his cock and Bernadetta to whimper with her legs on his shoulders, and he wants Annette to sob when he fingerfucks her ass because he’s sucking on her clit. He wants Lysithea to stretch her sweet mouth swallowing down his length and he wants Bernadetta to lick his rim, stretching him open with her tongue. He wants Annette to grind her pussy against his mouth and Lysithea to get jealous. He wants Bernadetta, dangerous, subtle Bernadetta, to slip Felix inside her as the other two bicker, rolling her hips with her eyes closed and letting the world fade to nothing except Felix filling her up and making her moan.

Felix shudders. He doesn’t want to look any closer, as much as he’s crumbling beneath it all.

They’re dead. Nothing will ever bring them back. Those fleeting moments of fascination when he was a teenager had never amounted to anything close to love, and now he’s older. He’s older than they’ll ever be, two years shy of a decade they’ll never touch, on the other side of a war they’ll never get to see. He knows all of this but nothing makes it better. Nothing makes it easier.

They still wait, as hungry for him as he is for them, still in the uniform of the Officer’s Academy and _young_ , as if the war had never happened at all. Lysithea runs out of patience and strides right up to him, poking him firmly in the chest.

Felix intercepts her hand, gripping it tight enough for her to glare. He throws it aside, unbuttoning his collar with his other hand as he pushes his way into his room. They’re not real. No matter what it feels like, what it looks like, they’re not real. He knows that. All the same, he shuts and bolts the door before leaning against it, discarding his shirt and undoing his pants. He clenches his jaw, hating that he’s already hard, hating that his cock is slick with pre-come and it shows. 

He closes his eyes, shivering when the first pair of hands touch his body.


End file.
